Review: System Mechanic 9.5

We've all experienced the scenario before: a computer is getting a bit long in the tooth and becomes sluggish, less responsive and seemingly cluttered full of processes and applications that are far from essential to the smooth running of your operating system.

Opting for a complete hardware upgrade in this situation is fairly common, and certainly in a business environment could involve considerable expense. So can a suite of tools such as System Mechanic breathe new life into a flagging machine and at least delay the inevitable?

We tested the new System Mechanic 9.5, which includes a number of upgrades and additions. Windows 7 users can benefit from an integrated Jump List to provide information on system status and performance, and a Health Status gadget offers real-time reports on heath, security and other issues.

An EnergyBooster tool, meanwhile, frees up system memory and CPU resources by turning off unused background processes, and there's now an incinerator for the Recycle Bin to permanently delete files to 5220-22M Department of Defence compliance.

In addition, a Registry Revitaliser combines all registry maintenance tools into one handy package, and the new Tune-Up Definitions retrieves updates to enhance performance gathered from data anaylsis of trends from millions of computers globally. Many of the existing tools have also been enhanced to improve performance and ensure full compatibility with Windows 7.

These additions should sit quite nicely with the already extensive collection, which is presented in a very clear interface that shows current system status and allows users to 'Repair All' or view the current reported issues and opt to handle them individually.

The range of tools available are too numerous to list here, but suffice to say that just about every area of a computer that could be optimised or enhanced is covered. To make things a bit more manageable, these are organised into collections that include a PC Accelerator, PC Repair, PC Cleanup, PC Security and the Registry Revitalizer.

There's also a degree of automation here, as the ActiveCare section allows you to set clean up and repair tasks to run in the background to avoid having to repeatedly check and correct issues.

While it's fair to say that System Mechanic is extremely comprehensive and very easy to use, we were really interested in how effective it is at cleaning a system and improving performance. We used the software on a test machine running Windows XP that's around five years old and has been relatively 'neglected' in terms of keeping it uncluttered and in good condition.

This may well reflect a typical situation for many computers in an office so, while the results are somewhat subjective as every condition and configuration will be different, they can be appreciated as a rough approximation.

Our initial system state was reported as 'Poor'. A quick analysis took just over a minute and yielded seven problems and one warning. A deep analysis took just under seven minutes and yielded nine problems and one warning. These included fragmented drives, registry problems, system clutter, an apparently un-optimised internet connection and some security vulnerabilities.

You are generally given quite a lot of information on the types of issues you'll encounter and how they affect your computer, but it's not possible to review the individual problems within each category, which does mean that you're reliant on the software in correctly identifying flaws.

One-click repair
We opted for the one-click repair to clean this all up, which took only two minutes, although we omitted a hard drive defrag during this process the first time round. A system restart is required, which we presume is an inevitable drawback of all this fixing and optimising, although it's worth noting here that this also crops up on occasion with the ActiveCare scans enabled, which can be inconvenient.

Prior to running System Mechanic 9.5 our test system took one minute to cold-boot to the Windows Desktop and an additional 50 seconds to load Firefox and display a web page. It was also using about 75 per cent of the available physical memory and 25 per cent of paged memory in an idle state.

After a full repair (omitting a defrag) the boot time was reduced to 50 seconds, and Firefox started up after an additional 18 seconds, so the operating system was significantly faster to boot and respond in loading software following the repair.

In addition, memory use dropped to 48 per cent (physical) and 16 per cent (paged), so System Mechanic certainly seems capable of making an impact. We ran the repair again, this time defragmenting the hard drive along the way. This took an additional 36 minutes, incidentally, although we saw no more than a cou ple of seconds saving on both boot time and application start time, and memory use remained the same.

Unfortunately there's not a lot of information on exactly what's been done to a system following a repair, but it is possible to view a general history and roll back changes using the SafetyNet tool. Actions can be undone based on category to avoid having to revert back to a previous system state, which is a nice touch.

It's possible to review changes made to the Startup Settings here. A quick scan of the results revealed that the three processes that had been disabled were indeed unnecessary for general use, no doubt contributing to the increase in performance.

System Mechanic certainly seems to produce the sort of figures that justify its claims, and we did notice what felt like more streamlined operation and faster application loading during general Windows use after running it.

While it's true that savvy users may be able to perform many of these optimisations manually or by using free tools, this is certainly a fast and effective way to simplify the process and, for ageing computers that are becoming frustrating to use, it's difficult not to recommend it.

Pricing
System Mechanic 9.5 is available as a three-PC consumer version for £30 and as a business edition for any number of computers under a site licence. The price varies here, but expect to pay between £9 and £11 per machine. Iolo is also working on an update to allow administrators to install the software remotely across a network, which will be a boon for larger workgroups, but no release date for this is confirmed.

CD or DVD drive (for CD installation), 256MB of RAM, 25MB of available hard disk space, Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, 64/32-bit Windows 7/Vista/XP